I have a very old server running gentoo on a 1.5 GHz AMD Duron with 1 GB ram. This geezer is 7 years old.

I have a new machine to take over that old machine's duties. It is an AMD F2 8 core 3.12 GHz with 16 gb ram.

I wanted to try the "easy way" to set up the new machine, so I built and installed gentoo on the new box and got it to boot, etc. Then I copied all the non-kernel files from the old box onto the new box. After a reboot, it came up.

Now I wanted to upgrade from the 32 to the 64 bit system, so I went to http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/change-chost.xml where it tells about "Changing the CHOST variable". After editing /etc/make.conf to set the new value of CHOST, I did the recommended emerge binutils gcc glibc, but if barfed.

I realize this is an attempt at a shortcut, but if I can get it to work, it would save me a lot of trouble trying to duplicate the setup on the old machine. Can anybody suggest a way to solve this problem, short of a complete re-install?

BTW Both of these machines have RAID mirrors, so I pulled a drive from the RAID before I started this lunacy -- just in case. _________________The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

you just need to copy your world file and /home and emerge -e world with good 64 bit make.conf settings then copy what you need left from /etc and your done

yes this is basically 100% reemerging everything anyways, but so is changing your chost

and or your makefile your trying to use might be bad, bad flag or something if gcc cant make executables_________________A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.

This is a FAQ. To make a long story short: You cannot "upgrade" 32 bit to 64 bit. Even the basic layout differs (e.g. /usr/lib is a symlink on a 64 bit system but a directory on a 32 bit system). In theory it is possible if you install a cross-compiler and do a lot of things manually, but practically it is not possible: The time to copy your configuration files manually is much less than the time to learn the messy details of cross-compiling and multilib on gentoo.

OK, thanks to both of you. I will restore from the pulled raid volume, then try the trick djdunn suggested with copying the world file, then emerging everything after that._________________The MyWord KJV Bible tool is at http://www.elilabs.com/~myword

Moriah: to be clear, you must start with an amd64 stage and run the emerge from there. You should wipe out any system directories on the AMD F2, boot from amd64 capable media, and install a new amd64 system, then copy in your configuration and personal files. You can use your old world file as a reference, but you cannot readily use any of the old x86 system to prepare the new amd64 system.